Why has unmanned retail changed from hot to cold?

With labor costs rising year by year, the popularization of mobile payment and the rapid development and application of artificial intelligence, big data, and other cutting-edge technologies, the new retail self-service industry is booming. Unmanned retail as a representative of it has exploded with huge potential. Giants and emerging start-ups are swarming, but at the same time they are also accelerating the industry reshuffle. At the recently held 3rd China Unmanned Retail Conference and the 2019 Shanghai International Unattended Retail Exhibition, hundreds of traditional retailers, unmanned retail, and intelligent vending technology software and hardware service providers jointly appeared and demonstrated retail intelligence. New technologies and new trends of transformation. According to data from the Prospective Industry Research Institute, in recent years, the number of self-service vending machines in China has shown a rapid growth of more than 30%, reaching 310,000 tons as of 2018. 'Unmanned retail cooling' supports Alipay, WeChat and face payment, and a single purchase can be completed in as fast as 10 seconds. We provide an overall smart unmanned retail solution, including related hardware and software. At the China Unmanned Retail Conference, many exhibiting unmanned vending machine manufacturers were heard shouting. The exhibition was very lively, but the unmanned retail industry was changing from hot to cold. Once, from Bingo box to function space, from RT-Mart to Rainbow, from unmanned stores to unattended shelves and kiosks,'unmanned retail' was regarded as the key to the most popular new retail in the second half of 2017 word. According to data from iResearch Consulting, as of the end of 2018, there were more than 200 unmanned supermarkets in China and more than 30,000 unmanned retail shelves. The scale of transactions in the unmanned retail market (including automatic vending machines) is estimated to be close to 30 billion yuan, and it is expected to exceed 65 billion in 2020, with a three-year compound growth rate of about 50%. But beginning in 2018, a number of unmanned retail companies have fallen one after another. At the beginning of 2018, after receiving 100 million yuan of angel financing and 380 million yuan of A1 round of financing, Ampair was suddenly exposed to a large number of layoffs, which caused industry shock. In February of that year, the unmanned shelf project'GOGO Xiaochao' was exposed to suspension due to rapid expansion and problems with its launch strategy. It was only 4 months from the opening to the suspension. In July, Changsha's Fuligo unattended smart store relocated less than a year after its opening. At the beginning of 2019, the unmanned shelf company Guo Xiaomei also announced the abandonment of the unmanned shelf business. The unmanned retail that has receded its enthusiasm has entered an adjustment period. 'In my opinion, there must be a future for unmanned retail. But it is a pity that unmanned retail is now a'premature baby'. Today, many of us who do unmanned retail are actually preaching how to reduce the labor cost of convenience stores. More important than this is how to make consumers truly satisfied? Whether it is today's unmanned convenience store or unmanned shelf, I have found no real pain points. 'Zhang Sheng, director and vice president of Lawson (China) Investment Co., Ltd., told the CBN reporter. During the interview, the reporter learned that a large number of unmanned stores or unattended shelves of goods are very homogeneous. In the retail industry itself, such a low threshold and homogeneous operation will reduce the core competitiveness of the industry. Unmanned stores must sell products with high turnover rates, especially food and beverages, but such products do overlap in various stores. It is very difficult to compete for advantages in product categories. The category of unmanned stores or unattended shelves determines that the unit price per customer will not be high, and the per capita consumption is only a few yuan to a dozen yuan, and the daily turnover is only a few hundred yuan. Due to the lack of manual supervision at the front desk, the cargo damage rate will be very high. Some industry professionals pointed out that if the gross profit margin of the standard product is 20%, then the daily turnover of 100 yuan, if the goods of 10 yuan are lost every day, basically the business is not profitable. The next problem associated with cargo damage is expansion. If the cargo damage is too high, the greater the expansion, the greater the loss. However, expansion is necessary, especially for those businesses that have received a capital injection of 100 million yuan. If they do not have the scale, they will not be able to develop a platform-based business model in the future. Unmanned stores are not just about dazzling technology, they should also focus on the combined application of technology and commerce. Only by fundamentally reforming and innovating can we stand out in the unmanned retail competition where opportunities and challenges coexist.